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Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer and one of the nation's biggest book sellers, is one of the iconic companies of the Internet era.
It was founded in 1994 by Jeffrey P. Bezos, a former financial analyst for the New York hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Company who, legend has it, set...

In November 2007, the company made the leap from selling others' products to selling its own, as it introduced the Amazon Kindle, an electronic book reader with the capability of downloading books wirelessly. A few other companies, notably Sony, had been selling electronic book readers, but...

In addition to selling physical media like CDs, DVDs and books, it sells digital copies of these products as well. Amazon Unbox, which lets customers download movies and TV shows to their computers and certain TiVo boxes, opened in the fall of 2006.

In September 2007, the company rolled out its Amazon MP3 store, a rival to Apple's iTunes that makes downloadable music available without the cumbersome anti-copying software called D.R.M., or digital rights management. The service now has the participation of all the major music labels.

July 19, 2010 was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future. Amazon announced that during the previous three months, sales of books for the Kindle had for the first time outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

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The Kindle's success also brought a string of competitors into the market it had established, most notably the iPad, Apple's tablet computer with a high-contrast color screen, Web browser, games, applications and computing capabilities.

Amazon appears to be responding to the Apple threat by waging a publisher-by-publisher battle, trying to keep as many books as possible out of Apple's hands, while preserving as much flexibility as it can to set its own prices.